Chapters - Western Pacific

The Western Pacific Chapter was launched at the Annual ISoP Meeting in Bournemouth, UK in October 2007.

Objectives:

At the Annual Meeting in Liege in October 2006, a group from New Zealand, Philippines and Australia discussed the possibility of establishing a regional Chapter of ISoP.

Chapters are locally established sub-groups of the Society which are intended to actively address the needs arising from a range of pharmacovigilance activities in their respective countries. One important aim is to enable ISoP members to be personally involved in the future of pharmacovigilance in their region.

Following on from these initial discussions, it was decided that the Chapter of ISoP should include members in the countries in the WHO Western Pacific region (as shown in Table 1).

Table 1: Countries included in the WHO Western Pacific Region

American Samoa

Australia*

Brunei Darussalam

Cambodia

China**

Cook Islands

Fiji

French Polynesia

Guam

Hong Kong (China)*

Japan*

Kiribati

Korea, Republic of*

Lao People’s Democratic Republic Tonga Macao (China)

Malaysia*

Marshall Islands

Micronesia, Federated States of

Nauru

New Caledonia

New Zealand*

Niue

Northern Mariana Islands

Palau

Papua New Guinea

Philippines*

Pitcairn Islands

Samoa

Singapore*

Solomon Islands

Tokelau

Tonga

Tuvalu

Vanuatu

Vietnam*

Wallis and Futuna

* Countries with current ISoP members
** The China chapter was officially launched in Agra, October 2016
** The Indonesia chapter was officially launched in Liverpool, October 2017

ISoP members in Indonesia**,Taiwan, and Thailand have also been included in the Western Pacific Chapter. There are currently no other ISoP members in countries in the South East Asia WHO region.

The first coordinator of the Western Pacific Chapter was Dr Mira Harrison-Woolrych who was the former Director of the New Zealand Intensive Medicines Monitoring Programme (IMMP). Dr Suzette Lazo – former President of the Philippine Society of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and a member of the ISoP committee on elections 2006 – had agreed to act as Secretary of the Chapter. Appointed in 2016, Dr Richard Hill from TGA is the new coordinator and is encouraging all those with a keen interest in pharmacovigilance in the Western Pacific region to consider joining ISoP and participate in activities in this region.